The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

Let the attempt be made, at whatever risk.

Masculine observers, if the birth-mark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness, without the semblance of a flaw.

It [the scarlet letter] had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized.

She wanted—what some people want throughout life—a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy.

We are but shadows: we are, not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream,--till the heart be touched. That touch creates us--then we begin to be--thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity.